


with scarves of red (tied round their throats)

by TheJGatsby



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, F/M, No Dialogue, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 16:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5299025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellarke + winter wear</p>
            </blockquote>





	with scarves of red (tied round their throats)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from White Winter Hymnal by the Fleet Foxes

 

mitten

They wouldn’t remember it later, but they met when they were young.

It was snowing gently and the park was crowded and blanketed in white, and he saw her shoot down the hill in front of her father on a real sled, made of wood with real metal runners, and he felt a stab of jealousy as he gripped tight to the cracked-and-taped-up plastic sled in his hands. It was bright green and stood out against the stark ivory hill as he threw it down and pulled his baby sister on in front of him.

Their third or fourth go down, they got to the bottom at the same time as her, by herself on the sled now, her father off to the side on his cell phone. She didn’t know how to stop properly, so when she hit the bottom of the hill she flipped over herself and went tumbling. He jumped to his feet and slogged through the snow to her as fast as he could. Her mittens had been shoved into her coat pocket so she could grip the sled and steer, and they’d gone flying when she’d fallen off. They were pink and blue with a snowflake pattern, and he picked them up off the ground as he walked towards her.

She was sitting in the snow, dazed, but not crying. That surprised him. His sister always cried when she fell. He sometimes cried, too, but not anymore- he was too old for that. He thrust the mittens towards her and she looked up at him, blinking slowly. There was an awkward beat before she reached up and took the mittens from him and thanked him quietly. He blushed and looked away and held his hand out to help her up. She got to her feet and brushed the snow off, and he mumbled something about teaching her how to stop a sled. She smiled at him and his face got even redder.

Stars and snowflakes sprinkled the dark velvet sky when her father tugged her away, the sled under his arm. She turned and waved goodbye, and he waved sadly back, then took his baby sister by the hand and led her home, the green plastic sled leaving a long trail as he dragged it behind him through the snow to a little house without any lights in the windows.

boot

The second time they meet, they remember it.

It seems to start snowing earlier each year, and she thinks it gets deeper every time. It’s inconvenient for her- she’s short, and the snow rises halfway to her knees. Walking through it is like trudging through molasses, the feeling of trying to pull yourself out from a warm bed on a cold morning. High-stepping is even more difficult. Her dorm is a fifteen-minute walk away, and she sighs as she pulls her coat tighter around her, preparing herself to walk out of the warm safety of the library and into the chilly gloom and angry snowfall of the evening.

She only shuffles and struggles through the snow for about a minute before she happens upon a set of footprints, going the same direction as her. Experimentally, she steps into one footprint, then the next, and the next, and the next. The gait is awkward, ungainly, but it’s much faster going than trying to cut through the drifts on her own, so she lopes along cheerfully, staring at the ground and smiling underneath her scarf.

Looking for the next step consumes all her attention, and her eyes are firmly downcast, so she doesn’t notice the maker of the footprints in front of her until she collides head-on with his back. He turns around, unbothered, but she stumbles backwards and almost falls, before he grabs her with one hand on her arm and the other coming around her waist.

He’s handsome, strong-jawed and dark-eyed with a smattering of freckles across his high cheekbones and a matching smattering of snowflakes in his curly black hair. She feels herself go pink and hopes the cold disguises her blush. He pulls her to rights, and she stammers out an apology. He laughs. She frowns at him and he responds with a crooked grin and an excuse- she ran into him because she was too busy trying to walk in his footprints to see where she was going. It’s funny. Begrudgingly, she agrees.

He asks where she’s headed. They’re in the same dorm. She cracks a joke about him offering to walk her home, and he laughs again. The sound makes her smile, unbidden, and she decides she likes his laugh- it’s warm, low and smooth, and it makes her feel smugly satisfied, like she’s achieved something with his mirth.

She follows him home through his footsteps, and he walks her all the way to her door two floors above him, snowflakes still melting in his hair. His grin is wide and crooked and her chest feels warm as he wishes her goodnight, and she watches him walk away, the sound of his footfalls in his heavy winter boots echoing around the hall.

hat

They’re friends, after that.

It’s surprisingly easy to fall in together. They click in a way that’s unfamiliar and exciting, all the intrigue of a new friend mixed with the comforting feeling of getting along effortlessly. She walks behind him when the snow is deep and he teases her about it. He has a hundred different passions and she listens to him ramble for ages, because there’s something about his voice that makes even the dullest subject captivating- he could talk about car insurance for an hour and she’d be rapt. They both have opinions on everything and they bicker relentlessly, but rarely fight.

Honestly, she’s his favorite person. She’s bright and clever and incredible, and she understands him more easily than anyone else, and he’s glad every day that she ran into him that night. He loves her dearly, and he’ll be happy for the rest of his life just to have her as a friend, but he would be lying if he said he didn’t also want to wrap her in his arms and kiss her till they both floated up into the clouds, senseless and light and ecstatic. But she was his friend, and he didn’t want her so badly he’d be willing to risk that.

Besides, he’s never had a real relationship before. He isn’t sure how, honestly. He never had time or opportunity as a kid trying to pick up the slack his distant, wavering desert mirage of a  mother left, trying to supplement his grandparents’ shitty pension and keep a roof over their heads, trying to earn enough to maybe, someday, in a wild fantastical impossible dream, put himself through college, so instead he just has a lot of one-night stands, fun and casual and short, never getting invested. As a result, he has a reputation, even among his friends, even to her, as a casanova of sorts, never the same girl twice, never anything real. She doesn’t disrespect him for it, but- she also doesn’t realize that he could be serious, if he had the chance. He would be. It’s always been a possibility, he’s always been the kind of person who wants steadiness, commitment, a home found in another person. He could be serious and invested and real- in general, yes, but specifically about her. If she knew. If she’d let him. If she wanted him. He won’t gamble his best friend on a hundred ‘ifs,’ though, so it won’t ever come to anything. It’s just a knowledge he holds in his heart, along with every other fundamental truth about himself, his love for her slotted in on the shelf in his heart with his name and his sister and the feeling of his gramma’s hands taming his hair and fixing his tie before church every Sunday. It doesn’t need to be said, the feeling of it is enough. It has to be enough.

It’s almost a year since they met and the previous night was the first snowfall of the year.  They’re walking together, slowly, enjoying the crispness of the air and the fresh powder all around them, picturesque drifts and faint blue shadows. He pauses and breathes, letting the peace of the world in this frozen moment flow through him. A snowball hits him in the chest and he glares at her as she grins wickedly back at him. He gapes at her for a moment, then lunges forward and tugs her hat down over her eyes, taking advantage of her distraction to grab a fistful of snow off the ground. When she tugs her hat back into place, he throws the snowball and hits her square in the shoulder.

They fight dirty, and at the end of it they’re wrestling in the snow, and then she’s got him pinned and he’s staring up at her face, flushed and bright and smiling, her blue eyes alight, golden hair wild around her, and he feels something warm bloom in his chest and spread all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes, summertime in his heart despite the cold outside. He wants to kiss her. He doesn’t. The moment passes. She gets up and offers him a hand and he stands, smiling at her. They’re friends, he loves her, and in another part of his heart are a million moments like that, a hundred thousand could-have-beens, should-have-dones, almost-was, a pile of tiny regrets like sand in an hourglass. She’s his friend and he’d never give that up, but god he loves her.

coat

Her father dies in winter, before there’s any snow on the ground, when everything is gray and desolate.

She stands at the edge of the grave, the yawning hole in front of her echoing the chasm sitting somewhere behind her heart, where she used to feel love and joy and pain and anger and everything, everything, before his death sent a crack through her like a thunderbolt and she was suddenly split open and it was all falling down this cavernous gap into nothingness and she was just a ceramic doll dropped to the floor, cracked down the middle, motionless and purposeless and lifeless and hopeless.

Her mother tries to talk logistics, tries to ask her about her plans, taking a year off, deferring med school, all the facts and figures and details of life that don’t matter anymore. She feels distant from everything, closed off behind a glass wall, watching the world spin around her like she’s not a part of it anymore. She doesn’t feel like she’s a part of it anymore, doesn’t feel like she has the right. Who is she, this fallen-apart china doll, to walk among the living, to pretend she’s one of them, to pretend she’s not broken past remembering what it felt like to be whole the way they are? Trying to talk about her life like it’s still something real feels like a joke.

Grief is a funny thing. It’s like feeling all the pain in the world all at once, and at the same time nothing. It’s the point where you’re so frigid you start to go numb- the cold hurts, but you don’t really feel it. It’s a reality she can’t quite manage to touch. She reaches out, stretches out, grasping desperately, but it’s always just out of her grasp.

The grave in front of her is empty, until it’s not. The loud cranking machine lowers a wooden box into the ground. In the box is her father. She knows she’s not supposed to think that, she’s supposed to believe that her father is more than his body, that he’s everywhere, he’s in her heart, he’s in a better place, but she can never make any of that feel true. Her father is in a box, and now there’s a handful of dirt on the box, two handfuls, and she’s watching the box her father is in disappear under the soil, centimeter by centimeter, and she feels bile rise in her throat. She throws her own handful down with all the energy she can manage, which isn’t much, and she turns away from the grave.

Her best friend is there, because he always is. He’s always there when she needs him, warm and constant as the noonday sun, whatever she needs, everything she wants, and suddenly, inappropriately, the void where her heart used to sit aches with the intensity of her love for him, a thousand different colors of fondness and gratitude and trust and faith and everything he is to her, and it feels like treason to be thinking of anything other than her father right now, and she can’t tell whether she’s shaking now from the cold or her tears. He takes off his coat and drapes it over her shoulders and pulls her into him, wrapping his arms around her and encasing her in a universe all her own, made wholly of patience and comfort and understanding and all that he is, all his goodness, all the love he has in his limitless heart, and it feels for the first time in the eternity since she lost her father that there’s an end in sight, that one day she’ll feel real again, that it won’t feel like an open wound forever, and she presses her face into his chest, grounding herself to him like a lightning rod for her shattered self, free-flying scattered pieces gathered together again by the magnetism of him. He’s a reality she can touch, and she reaches out and wraps her arms around his waist, softly, carefully, afraid to cling too hard and feel him slip from her grasp.

He rests his chin on her head and it feels like a promise. She tightens her hold on him. He anchors her. The emptiness retreats, infinitesimally, infinitely, enough.

scarf

Healing is slow, but miraculous. Every day is a little less impossible than the last. She starts to feel whole again.

In the beginning, she spends more time at his place than her own. Eventually, she doesn’t have a place anymore. Her boxes are in his closet, her bed in his spare room. She fills a space he made in his life just for her. She fits perfectly. Piece by piece she rebuilds herself, from the bottom up. Day by day life gets more manageable, feels more real. Step by step she gets closer to him.

It’s not his intention, when he lets her move in with him. It wasn’t a play in a game or a step in a plot. It was just the natural thing to do, a friend in need and a solution he could offer. But it’s the start of it all- their lives aren’t just intertwined anymore, they’re practically indistinguishable. He wakes up first and brews her coffee, strong and black like crude oil, teases her when she shuffles out of bed. She makes to-do lists and sticks them to the fridge with magnets shaped like pastries and she can never manage to measure out a reasonable portion of pasta for just two people. They always have leftovers.

By the time it happens, they’re both on the verge of it anyway. It’s not as much of a leap, now, not like it would have been before. They’ve become essential to each other, neither can imagine a future without the other. At some point it became clear to both of them that their hearts echoed each other in every way, but it wasn’t urgent. She loved him, he loved her, and it was going to happen, it was just a matter of the right moment. When it happened, it wasn’t fireworks or lightning bolts, it didn’t shake the earth and bring their world to its knees. It was soft, like putting on a worn-in sweater, the comfort of settling gently into place. It was a soft kiss in their kitchen on an ordinary night, and then it was like re-reading a favorite book- thrilling and wondrous, familiar and dear. They stepped into the next part of ‘them’ without hesitation or uncertainty. It felt like coming home.

She still walks in his footprints when the snow is deep. He wraps her scarf around his hands and pulls her in for a kiss.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://www.thejgatsbykid.tumblr.com)!


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